it was twenty-nine. Everything that might get frosty is. I feel the
cold in my head and my fingers. I have a band around my ears, but the
top of my head is exposed. (I lost the nice REI skull cap.) And my
fingers. I have been wearing a pair of Thinsulate driving gloves,
which until today had bee perfect.
But being outside at this time of day still feels great. The streets
are quiet, there are few cars. Like going back in history. How far
back would one have to go for there to be so little traffic? Probaby
forty or fifty years.
The bike ride from my house to the Selby-Western area is almost
entirely along Laurel Avenue, except for a jog to Summit and back
getting over Ayd Mill Road, and the turn north on Western. Laurel,
which reachs from the Mississippi on the west, near Shadow Falls, to
near the Cathedral of Saint Paul on the east, ends at Nina Street.
Nina was a woman who ran a brothel nearby.
The ride is like an archeological, geologic historic journey. I was
struck today by an old house, eighty years old at least, surrounded
left, right, and back, equally aged biuldings. Not just a hold out,
that house, but a long time hold out. The ride is like a passage
through a protracted, real-life Monopoly game. Slow motion Sim City.
Small houses give way to duplexes, then apartments. A few blocks oxer,
mansions. Nearby, the lesser homes of managers and professionals. All
atop 500 million years of bedrock, and punctuated with evidence of
thousands of years of human habitation.
--
David
www.schons.net
